Mac OS X Lion Pains

Actually, there aren’t many pains. It wasn’t too difficult to learn “natural scrolling”. It gets a little confusing when you’ve got to go back to a Windows PC that does not have “natural scrolling” configured, but fortunately, I don’t use a Windows PC all that often. I usually can make do with Windows running in VMware Fusion on my MBP, and natural scrolling works there, naturally. The way Mail.app has rearranged my mail working space took more effort to get used to. I think I probably missed several emails because they became hidden behind threads that I had assumed have already been read.

The biggest pain, and then again it isn’t something that bugs me on a daily basis, but can be really annoying when it does… is printing. The Lion prints. Except that in Apple’s haste to abandon Samba, it seems they have forgotten about printing to Windows shared printers. For some reason, Lion cannot print to printers that are served through Windows SMB shares.

Considering that most enterprises would likely have Windows deeply entrenched in their corporate network, I didn’t think this would be something that Apple would have overlooked. Apple’s newer SMB implementation was supposed to be more forward looking, supporting methods new in Windows Vista and Windows 7. I thought perhaps the problem was with old servers in my organization.

Now, I’m not so sure. Did Apple really royally mess up Windows printing? It just seems so shocking. Did no Lion beta tester ever had to print to a Windows shared printer? It sounds quite unbelievable.

I don’t print that much. Definitely not on a daily basis. But it certainly makes printing a very cumbersome task now if I had to get something printed.